Pizza employee caught working a con to give free food to homeless man for months.
'Can't buy a homeless man a pizza? Fine by me.'
Back in the early 2000's, I worked at a well-known US pizza delivery chain store. For anyone who has ever worked in the US food service industry, you're probably familiar with what a failing dumpster fire of a restaurant looks like. On many nights it was literally just me and one driver taking care of the whole restaurant.
Breaks were out of the question because the restaurant would be completely unattended, the recent franchise buyers were complete and total idiots who would show up unannounced to yell at me, and the overwhelming majority of our customers ordered once and then never again.
We had pizza deliveries taking 90+ minutes, people bringing them back to the store ... it was a nightmare. And I got paid $8.50/hour to run shifts.
One night I was running a shift and it was particularly dead. Such nights were not uncommon and they were basically the only reason I still worked there. Well, 11pm rolls around as I'm kind of standing by the phones watching the clock tick down, and a clearly homeless man walks in.
He introduces himself as Ricky and asks if we had any leftover pizzas that nobody picked up.
I apologetically inform him that we didn't. He smiles and thanks me anyway, but then since I'm in such a good mood, I ask him what he wants. He says he likes the meat lovers' pizza.
Since he isn't a sociopath like some of our customers (I'm looking at you, Mr. Teriyaki Bacon and Sardines Guy), I say I'll be happy to make him one. Ricky at this point is so thankful that he sits down in one of our chairs and starts bouncing up and down like a little kid.
I put the order in and pay for it myself. It ends up being $12, or basically an hour and a half of work for me. Good deal in my mind. Ricky watches me and applauds my dough slapping/spinning skills.
As the pizza comes out of the oven, in comes the area manager - the brother of the franchise owner. He begins shouting as usual and accuses me of stealing from the store.
As he goes into his tirade, one of our few regulars, Henry, comes in. Henry hears the tirade and looks very uncomfortable. I finally tell the area manager that I paid for the pizza out of my own pocket.
Area manager shouts a bit more, calls me a liar, says the count better be right that night, and leaves. I apologize to Henry and Ricky, who both tell me, an 18-year-old kid, 'Yeah work sucks doesn't it.'
Ricky gets his pizza, Henry gets his, and they leave around the same time. I see them talking outside.
The next night, Henry calls me for an order. This was unusual because he was generally a once a week guy. I also found it unusual that he ordered a meat lovers' pizza instead of his usual supreme.
I took it, made it, and 20 minutes later Henry calls again apologetically to cancel it. I say OK. In a bizarre coincidence, Ricky rolled in right around that time asking for a pizza. I just so happened to have one that was going to go uneaten sitting under the heater.
And so began the nightly dance. Henry would call, order a meat lovers' pizza, and I'd make it. Henry would then call again, cancel, and Ricky would coincidentally roll in. Every night, at the same time. You could time it to the second. This went on for months.
Eventually the area manager caught wind because a bootlicker co-worker of mine narced on me, but I responded that I was just doing my job as instructed. They then stopped putting me into the schedule rotation in a quiet-firing sort of way, but I really didn't care.
The restaurant went under about a year later. Obviously it wasn't all Henry, but I was glad to see it go.
Here were the top rated comments from readers:
Thank you for feeding that man as many times as you did. This story made my whole night better.
This. I've had to deal with homeless people more than a few times when I worked retail. You want a meal? I got you. I just wish I could have helped more. They usually have some nasty problems.
You and Henry are now the patron Saints of Pizza.
St. Anthony can move over.
Good people doing good for the sake of being good. I love it. Besides if a business can't cover the loss of 1 pizza a day (when most pizza places will give their employees free food anyway) they don't deserve to be in business.
The OP responded here:
Yeah, that was the crazy thing to me too! One single pizza is a blip in the inventory. I know because I did inventory every night.
On a busy night we'd be something like 3-4 pizzas worth of ingredients short naturally because we tended to go heavier than the recommended guidelines on the cheese, as putting the recommended amount of cheese on a pizza would piss the customer off (it was way too little).